“You were no spring chickens!” Aunt Abigail declared. “And you had families—you shouldn’t have been gallivanting around!”
“You were having too much fun,” Aunt Martha chimed in.
“Girls, girls,” my grandmother said. My mom gave my hand a quick squeeze under the table. I could tell the word fun had affected her, if not as powerfully as altitude.
Elliot Barlow was a brave little man. He tried to describe the plot of The Kiss in Düsseldorf, the first of his parents’ Nazi-era novels. It was a valiant effort: not to make his parents sound like hacks; not to call their novels potboilers; not to be outmaneuvered by my uncles’ interruptions. The intrepid snowshoer began, unwisely, with the eponymous kiss. Two SA men are seen kissing each other during Hitler’s speech in Düsseldorf in 1932.
“A two-and-a-half-hour speech—what a kiss!” Uncle Martin declared.
“The SA stands for Sturmabteilung—the Nazi storm troopers,” Uncle Johan, ever the German teacher, explained.
“Ernst Röhm and Rudolf Hess were in the SA,” Uncle Martin offered. “Röhm and Hess were Freikorps guys originally, before they were Nazis—Martin Bormann was a Freikorps guy, too.”
“Right-wing nationalists, they were the bunch behind the stab-in-the-back legend,” Uncle Johan interjected. “Die Dolchstosslegende!” he cried, causing the startled emeritus to lose control of his knife and fork. Like everyone else, Grandaddy Lew hadn’t really been eating. He’d been picking through his casserole, searching in vain for something recognizable.
My mother was seated between Elliot Barlow and me. Under the table, I could see she’d taken his small hand and was holding it in her lap. They’d scarcely touched the beer they were sharing—their first one.
Whether the hand-holding had distracted the snowshoer, or his grasp of The Kiss in Düsseldorf had slipped away, Elliot suddenly said: “One of the SA men seen kissing during Hitler’s speech in Düsseldorf is murdered. His killer is alleged to be the SA man who kissed him. Soon other Nazi storm troopers are found murdered, but they never find the kissing killer—that’s the plot.”
“Ernst Röhm was co-founder and a leader of the Sturmabteilung,” Uncle Johan jumped in. “Röhm’s homosexuality was well known.”
“Hitler had Röhm killed because Röhm was a homosexual,” Uncle Martin emphatically stated.
“Röhm had fought on the Western Front—he was awarded an Iron Cross,” Uncle Johan explained.
“Röhm was wounded—he lost a piece of his nasal bone!” Uncle Martin wanted everyone to know.
“No nasal bones—not when we’re eating!” Aunt Abigail ordered.
“Or even when we’re not eating!” Aunt Martha chimed in. My aunts’ interest in the conversation had peaked when the kissing men were mentioned, and when the words homosexuality and homosexual were used. Each occasion caused Aunt Abigail and Aunt Martha to stare intently at the little English teacher.
“As for the plots of my parents’ Nazi-era novels, like their Cold War novels…” Elliot Barlow quietly persisted. Then he paused. Everyone’s attention was drawn to the childlike behavior of the unfulfilled emeritus. He was not only eating voraciously; he was attempting to feed himself with a serving spoon, which was too big for his mouth. “The plots are all the same,” Elliot now resumed. “The killer is never caught. It helps that he’s killing bad people—no one’s trying very hard to catch him. Cynical characters, bleak nonendings,” the snowshoer concluded; his voice petered out. His heart wasn’t in it, and what was the point?
Martin and Johan were poised to interrupt him—Johan, in two languages. The hand-holding under the table had not convinced Abigail and Martha that Elliot Barlow was heterosexually inclined. My grandmother was an old-fashioned literary snob; Nana had never finished a single one of Simenon’s novels—she said she’d tried. She didn’t care for Eric Ambler, either. She claimed she’d never heard of Patricia Highsmith, but Nana had liked the Hitchcock film (Strangers on a Train) adapted from Highsmith’s first novel. It wouldn’t have mattered to my grandmother to hear that Patricia Highsmith, who was born in Texas, was better published and more widely read in German than in English, or that Elliot Barlow’s parents had made their living from murder novels.
“Mord, mehr Morde, noch mehr Morde!” Uncle Johan interjected, which he immediately translated into English, thus giving me an insightful glimpse of his repetitious classroom technique. “Murder, more murders, still more murders! The Germans take murder more seriously than we do—I mean, as literature,” Uncle Johan explained.
“I want to be completely honest with you,” the snowshoer blurted out, speaking directly to my mother and looking only at her.
“Yes, I feel the same way about you!” my mom didn’t hesitate to tell him, in her breathless fashion. My aunts had stopped breathing; they were praying for a confession of pederasty from the little English teacher. Even my uncles stopped talking. By the way Elliot Barlow suddenly sat bolt upright at the table, I could tell my mother must have grabbed his knee or his thigh. I’d missed seeing when they finished the first and second beers they’d been sharing—now I saw they had halfway finished their third.
“I love my parents—their writing, not so much,” Elliot earnestly said. “Their writing never exceeds the limitation of its genre, no matter what the Germans call Literatur; their writing is formulaic noir, but I love my parents nonetheless. I love them anyway.” Mr. Barlow’s eyes were locked on my mom’s throughout his heartfelt proclamation. While this was arguably not the declaration of love Little Ray had hoped to hear, she managed to mask her disappointment with an unfollowable tangent—a tactic familiar to me but baffling to Elliot, who had no previous experience with my mom’s method of changing the subject (again and again) until she ended up with the conversation she’d wanted to have in the first place.
Little Ray took the snowshoer’s face in her hands, pulling him closer. “Look at me,” she commanded him. “I would rather have altitude sickness than read anything. Oxygen deficiency is more interesting than writing—at least you feel something!” my mother cried. “Headache, nausea, swelling of the brain, even high-altitude flatulence—at least you can feel them!”
“All you can do is avoid alcohol and drink a lot of water,” Elliot told her with the utmost seriousness. “I find that eating dried apricots sometimes helps,” he added.
“Dried apricots make me fart more!” my mom cried.
“I meant that the apricots help with other symptoms of altitude sickness,” the little English teacher mumbled.
“I’ve heard that children born at altitude are abnormally small,” Aunt Abigail interjected.
“Maybe they just don’t develop,” Aunt Martha chimed in.
“My mother heard this, too,” Elliot calmly replied. “But she was also told that this was an old wives’ tale. And my birth weight was almost normal, though I was undersize.” My mom had not let go of his face. Out of customary politeness, Elliot had tried to look at my aunts when he spoke to them, but my mother wouldn’t let him turn his face away from her.
“Listen to me,” Little Ray said to the snowshoer. “You’re the handsomest man I’ve ever sat this close to. And you know what small does to me,” she said in her huskiest voice. Her lips almost touched Elliot’s ear. In his wildest dreams, he might have imagined she was going to kiss him. That was when my mom loudly said: “No man can be small enough for me, Elliot—or so I thought, before I met you.”